Interview: Hayley Parsons - Spirit of enterprise.

(From Post Magazine)

As everyone in the personal lines space is rapidly becoming aware, aggregators are everywhere. At least a dozen brand names have followed the pioneering moves of Moneysupermarket and Confused.com, and the market is likely to become further congested, with new entrants mooted all the time.

Now managing director at start-up Gocompare.com, Hayley Parsons spent the previous six years with Admiral-owned Confused.com, which effectively puts her among the most experienced professionals in the sector.

"My time had come at Admiral," says Ms Parsons, adding that she had in fact spent almost her entire working life with the insurer in some capacity, having worked there since its launch in 1993.

"I wanted to take control of things myself. But I wanted to do it all again, this time using the opportunity to go off and do something a little bit different. It's great because I am doing the whole thing again using modern technology - some of the existing platforms are now quite dated."

Ms Parsons explains that the ability to produce quotes and develop products has moved on exponentially since the introduction of aggregators. "Six years on, technology has really advanced. Here we had the opportunity to build something completely new, on a completely different platform and the way we produce quotes and the development is so much quicker on the newer technology. Some of the systems that aggregators are on now are no longer supported. Programmers don't want to write in that sort of language - they want to use dot net and the new IT languages that are around now. Life has moved on."

A hard sell